


Fourteen Karat

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Non-Magical, Best Friends, Developing Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, Implied Sexual Content, Light Angst, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Female Character, Road Trips, Romance, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-02
Updated: 2016-10-02
Packaged: 2018-08-17 07:42:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8135864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: “I’ve loved you since I was eleven,” he snaps, the words slipping, tumbling, colliding like he’s been holding onto them far too tightly for far too long. “That’s half my life.”
Above him—above them—the moon is a white-bright silver dollar, painting his blond hair blonder and making her think stupid, ridiculous,poetic things. He’s effervescent. The center of her world. She’s been circling him for half her life, and gravity was being such a bitch now that it had caught up with her.
“Yeah,” she replies, stiffly sitting up. The truck bed creaks, suspension as fragile as her grip on reality. “As a friend, right?”
[ ALTERNATIVELY - Pansy and Draco go on a road trip to nowhere, and still somehow get lost along the way. ]





	

* * *

 

_Saturday, August 27th_

_Somewhere in Nebraska_

 

The moon is full, and the stars are twinkling, and the sky is _clear_.

Pansy is lying flat on her back in the bed of the shitty rental truck, wearing nothing but a lacy violet bra and a pair of denim cutoffs. Her arms and legs are still itchy from her sprint through the cornfield, and the tacky temporary tattoo on her left ankle is finally beginning to peel, chemically enhanced slivers of strawberry-scented latex flaking off her skin and leaving filmy red rubble behind. She’s using her discarded tank top as a pillow. Her convenience store flip-flops are stacked in a dusty heap next to her bare feet.

And everything feels a little unreal, like she’s an outsider looking in—like she can’t _possibly_ be solely responsible for the natural fucking _disaster_ she’d just witnessed, the storm-torn ache in her chest and the lightning-scarred streaks of Urban Decay on her cheeks—

Up above her head, a star winks.

And she laughs, suddenly, laughs and licks her lips and tastes cotton candy, artificial sweetener and mechanically spun sugar, waning malty hints of that beer Draco’s been buying six-packs of since they’d been old enough to know better.

He hadn’t chased her.

She hadn’t really expected him to.

And maybe that’s what she’d been counting on. Maybe that’s what she’d wanted all along. A reason to say no. An excuse to keep running. Justification for not taking a risk—for not taking _the_ risk—sooner than she had.

She sighs, wistfully, and the sound melds with the breeze.

Summer’s almost over. Tan lines won’t matter in another few weeks.

She wonders when everything had gotten so _fucked_.

 

* * *

 

_Saturday, August 20 th_

_Wikieup, Arizona_

 

The diner is small and mostly empty—the kind of place where blister-burnt coffee, processed American cheese, and cheap maple syrup go to die.

“What the fuck,” Draco asks, and since it isn’t really a _question_ , Pansy doesn’t feel guilty for not really deigning to _answer_.

“Do you think they have sweet potato fries here?” she muses instead, plucking at the laminated corners of a ketchup-stained menu.

Draco’s nostrils flare. “Pansy.”

“ _Draco_ ,” she mimics.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he says again, tone edging in on plaintive.

“Shh,” she hushes him, directing a blandly winning smile at a nearby waitress. “This is, like, the _bible belt_ , you can’t just say—”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Draco interjects, snidely.

Underneath the table, Pansy kicks at his kneecaps. “What is _wrong_ with you?”

“What’s wrong with _me?_ ” he bleats. “Last I checked, _I_ was not the one who dragged _you_ out of bed at three in the _fucking_ morning.”

“Is _that_ what you’re having a tantrum about?”

He stares at her, flatly unimpressed, but then he tilts his head back against the tacky turquoise vinyl of their booth, heaving a sigh that’s partially exasperated but mostly contrite. The line of his jaw is oddly delicate at this angle, squared-off and sharp. He’s always been a little prettier than her.

“I forgot what week it was,” he eventually offers, and Pansy knows it’s an apology.

“Lucky you,” she coos.

He winces. “Did it have to be a _road trip?_ ”

She shrugs. “Better than another visit to the cemetery.”

He runs his tongue along the ridge of his front teeth, a flash of slick cherry red against bright, bright white. Their first year of college, he’d wanted to pierce it. Pansy had laughed at him for an _hour._

“Where are we going, then?”

“Wherever we want.”

“Oh, _now_ you care about what I want.”

“You _did_ love Jack Kerouac in high school,” she reminds him with a droll pop of her gum.

Draco snorts, lips twitching, and then uses his middle finger to push his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose.

Pansy’s reflection is distorted beyond all recognition in the mirrored silver lenses of his Ray-Bans.

 

* * *

 

_Monday, August 22 nd _

_East Carbon City, Utah_

 

That first night, they stay in the nicest hotel they can find—a spectacularly shitty Motor Lodge with retro orange shag carpet and a television that still has a functioning antenna.

It’s uncomfortable, the paper-thin mattress and the cardboard-stiff pillows and the way Draco’s elbow digs into her ribs when he rolls over the next morning; she groans, glancing blearily at the plastic analog alarm clock, and he presses his face into her hair, yawning hotly against the nape of her neck.

It’s intimate, waking up like this, intimate and hazy and _warm_.

It’s never bothered her before. It doesn’t bother her _now_. It doesn’t. It just—

“What’s wrong?” he mumbles, voice thick with sleep.

She holds herself still, ignoring the heat of his palm against her lower abdomen and how it elicits the most insidiously delicious shiver up and down the curve of her spine. “Nothing,” she lies.

He goes quiet for a while, absently rubbing his thumb along the hollow of her pelvis, and she squeezes her eyes shut. _Hard._ “Nightmare?” he asks, tone perfectly neutral.

“No.” She huffs, then, knowing she needs to end the conversation; needs to stop it before it gains any traction. “I’m probably just about to get my period.”

He shoves her away with an exasperated chuckle, scrubbing at the dark blond stubble on his chin, and she smirks, climbing out of bed with his old lacrosse jersey slipping down one shoulder, her hair knotted in a bun and the previous day’s mascara clumped and smudged beneath both eyes.

He brushes his teeth while she shaves her legs, and she pencils on her lip liner while he complains about the water pressure, and it occurs to her, after they’ve checked out and stowed their bags in the trunk and stopped at a gas station in an old mining town—it occurs to her that she should be _immune_ to this by now. Immune to him.

She used to be, she thinks, a little despondently.

She _used_ to be.

She’d been unfazed by the sight of him without a shirt, by the smooth interplay of muscles in his upper back, his shoulders, the lean length of his torso and the soft pink of his lips and his hands, bigger and broader and _stronger_ than hers, the navy blue freckle in his right eye that she isn’t sure anyone else has ever noticed and the waxy crescent-shaped burn mark on his foot from when they’d tried smoking menthols in the eighth grade and it’s not _fair_ that she can’t go back to that, that she can’t go back to being thirteen, sixteen, nineteen and oblivious and it’s not even her _fault_ , is it, it’s—

“Hey, I finally found something uglier than that Betsey Johnson shit you used to wear,” Draco says, grinning as he flops down in the driver’s seat with a crinkling white bag.

“You _bought me_ that Betsey Johnson shit, remember?” Pansy asks, picking at her cuticles. “I only wore it because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

He scoffs, rummaging through the bag. “Bullshit. You had _pink highlights_ in our Homecoming pictures, the evidence is still on my parents’ living room wall.”

Pansy sniffs. “ _Frosted tips_ ,” she says, pointedly.

“ _Body glitter_ ,” Draco retorts, just as pointedly.

“At least I didn’t ask for a _tanning bed_ for my fifteenth birthday—”

“ _Anyway_ ,” he interrupts, expression uncharacteristically flustered. “Look, they sell _mullet hats_ here! Like—it’s a _hat_ , right, but it’s also a _wig_.”

“Oh, is _that_ what the Von Dutch guy is up to these days?” Pansy drawls.

And Draco chokes out a laugh, shaking his head as he holds out a bottle of Mountain Dew and a family-size bag of Cheddar & Sour Cream Ruffles, and it’s—it’s fine.

Fine.

It’s _fine_.

 

* * *

 

_Saturday, August 27 th_

_Somewhere in Nebraska_

 

They don’t actually know where they are when Pansy’s car stops working.

“The, uh, the computer’s all fucked up,” the grease-stained mechanic explains, scratching the back of his neck and sneaking not-so-surreptitious glances at Pansy’s legs, and Pansy’s breasts, and Pansy’s _mouth_. “Happens sometimes, ‘specially with these foreign—”

“But you can fix it, right?” Draco demands, crossing his arms over his chest and raising an expectant brow.

“Yeah, sure,” the mechanic replies, sounding amused. “Next week.”

It turns out there isn’t a huge demand for spare Land Rover parts in Bumfuck, Nebraska. They’re handed the keys to a thirty-year old Ford pick-up— _“Guess you can call her our loaner,”_ the mechanic says with undisguised glee—and given directions to a motel that hasn’t been renovated since 1969— _“That Rob Zombie fella filmed a movie here,”_ the clerk at the front desk says with inexplicable pride—and, lastly, told about the county fair that’s taking place nearby, the closest thing to a nightlife they’re likely to find within a hundred-mile radius.

They go to the fair.

It’s a typical shitty cluster of muddy white tents and 4H showcases and rickety, rust-stained rides, a Ferris wheel that isn’t quite standing straight and a Gravitron that squeals murderously every time it starts to spin. There’s a sad little food court filled with funnel cakes and fried Twinkies, an honest-to-god _butter churning_ contest, and a long row of old-school carnival games that Pansy stares at for a minute too long, unexpectedly thrust back to a bittersweet memory of her mother signing her out of school and taking her to the boardwalk in Santa Monica and teaching her how to play Pac-Man.

Draco notices, of course, because Draco notices everything about Pansy, and he’s wordlessly stuffing a handful of pastel blue cotton candy in her mouth before she can muster up the courage to cry.

She doesn’t cry.

She _smiles_ instead, helpless and immeasurably grateful, and doesn’t overthink the lazy stutter of her pulse, the tightening in her gut that she’s always associated with a certain kind of anticipation. She’s so tired of fighting with herself. Of not even knowing if she’s winning, or losing, or being disqualified for wasting too much time.

The night goes on.

Draco wins her a giant teddy bear in a candy-red Cornhuskers t-shirt after finagling a way to cheat at ring toss, and she beats him at Skee Ball by almost two-hundred points after they discover the rundown arcade. She pelts him with caramel corn when he dares her to try the deep-fried Jelly beans, and he pinches her waist when she teases him about wanting to go to the petting zoo. A guy in a semi-official looking t-shirt with a Polaroid around his neck asks if he can take their picture— _“We’re gonna have a website next year”—_ and Draco slings his arm around Pansy’s shoulders, hesitating for a heart-stopping split-second before he drops a kiss onto her cheek, just as the flash goes off.

It’s normal, technically, an almost-shadow of how they’ve spent the past decade together, always on the same page and always on the same wavelength and always— _always_.

Because there have never been any surprises with Draco.

She will always find his jokes funny and he will always find her concern for him endearing and this night—this _trip_ —it’s a reminder of that. Always, _always_. And that strangely ethereal tension that’s been hovering between them for the past few days, taut like a bowstring and new enough that she hadn’t had a fucking _clue_ how to navigate the landscape of it, how to shut it down and clip its wings and prevent it from swooping, lurching, turning tangible and inevitable—that tension is all but gone.

She will always love him.

Always, _always_.

But maybe—

 

* * *

 

_Tuesday, August 23 rd_

_Hugo, Colorado_

 

It’s a little after ten at night when they pass it.

They’re driving through another tiny town that’s barely a footnote on the map, its skyline silhouette a familiar suspects lineup of water towers and windmills and sheet-metal grain silos. It’s hot out, the air still and stale and heavy as it filters through the vents in the dash.

Pansy’s sitting cross-legged in the passenger’s seat, smooth black leather slip-sliding against the backs of her bare thighs, the button-fly of her high-waisted shorts digging into her abdomen as she shifts around, trying to get comfortable. Her hair is piled on top of her head, flyaway strands sticking to her neck, her shoulders, her collarbones. Draco’s slouched behind the wheel, sweat beading on his upper lip and streaking the stubble-rough sides of his face.

“We should stop,” Pansy says, nodding at the flickering neon sign posted up next to the highway. “I could use, like, a _gallon_ of vodka right about now.”

Draco’s already slowing down, squinting at the somewhat derelict wooden building. “Is that—is that a _bar?_ ”

It’s a roadhouse, not a bar, but Pansy isn’t sure there’s much of a difference.

The interior is shabby and smoky and whiskey-soaked, wobbly off-center barstools infested with rednecks in cut-off flannels and plastic cups overflowing with cheap draft beer. A trio of dartboards line the cracked plaster wall next to the bathrooms, and a Willie Nelson song is blaring spottily from an oak-veneered speaker affixed to the ceiling.

It doesn’t take long for someone to approach them; for someone to approach _Draco_.

The girl doesn’t look old enough to be there. She’s tall, slender, legs long and smooth and sun-kissed in a low-rise denim miniskirt, the bottom of her Forever 21 sales-rack tank top riding up to expose a fucking _belly chain,_ Jesus Christ. She has scuff marks on her cork wedge espadrilles and her eyeliner is visibly uneven and her smile is half predatory, half sticky-sweet lip gloss and Pansy _knows_ , intellectually, that this girl isn’t Draco’s type, that he might not even bother to be _polite_ when he turns her down—

But Pansy stiffens anyway, clutches her vodka soda and wishes she’d ordered something better, been more adventurous, because it _irks her_ , she realizes, irks her that this—this _tramp_ in the middle of fucking nowhere has concluded that Pansy and Draco can’t possibly be _together_ , not like that, not when they’re so _obviously platonic_ that this girl hadn’t even spared Pansy a second glance before deciding to run her tacky Wal-Mart talons up and down Draco’s arm, and Pansy—

Pansy _loses her shit_.

That’s really the only explanation she has for how she spins around and drapes herself over Draco, lacing her fingers through his and pressing a daring—stupid, reckless, _stupid_ —kiss to the spot where his shoulder meets his neck. She feels him freeze, and then swallow, and then rub his thumb over her knuckles, just the once, almost as if he hadn’t made a conscious decision to do so.

And it’s temporary insanity. It has to be. Pansy will plead guilty to that, she will, because the alternative—jealousy, possessive and fierce—it’s fucking _unacceptable_.

But then the tramp is blinking at them, a sour blend of disappointment and skepticism flashing across her Maybelline-caked face as she saunters off to the pool tables.

Draco doesn’t speak for a while, but he doesn’t let go of Pansy’s hand and she doesn’t offer an explanation for what she’s just done because—god, the number of times they’ve been mistaken for an _actual couple_ is astronomical compared to the number of times they _haven’t been_ , and Pansy knows that, Pansy remembers that now, but she still—she’d still—she still hadn’t been able to _stop_ —

Draco licks his lips.

Pansy clears her throat.

“Would’ve probably been better off with a six-pack of Corona and another shitty motel room,” he finally says, voice slightly gravelly.

 

* * *

_Wednesday, August 24 th_

_Shiprock, New Mexico_

 

The sun is starting to set when it happens.

Pansy reaches out to adjust the air conditioning just as Draco reaches out to fuck with the GPS—and their hands brush, and her skin tingles, and it’s fucking _absurd_ , really, how violently she flinches backwards.

Because they touch _all the time_. They always have.

She curls up in his lap when she misses her mom and he carries her over his shoulder when he gets impatient and they fall asleep together five nights a week, in his bed, in her bed, in too-small tents in Pismo after being forced to go camping and on narrow poolside chaise lounges in Cancun during spring break and _god_ , they’ve been living in each other’s back pockets since before they’d hit _puberty_ , practically.

And even though Draco has eyes that remind her of the sky right before it rains, and cheekbones that make her want to design an exclusive line of menswear just so he can model it—their relationship, it isn’t _like that_. He knows exactly how much she weighs, down to the pound, and she knows exactly what kind of porn he watches, his mysterious preference for girls with her coloring, and there aren’t any boundaries between them, never have been, because they don’t lie to each other. It’s a rule, she supposes, unspoken but undeniably significant. No one will ever know her like Draco does.

“Okay?” he asks her now, mouth curled up in a bewildered half-smile.

“Yeah, sure,” she lies again. 

 

* * *

 

_Thursday, August 25 th _

_Jetmore, Kansas_

 

They skip Texas.

They’ve both been weirdly quiet since that night in Colorado, a peculiar thread of tension tying them together as seamlessly as it keeps them apart. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel as he drives, expression coolly contemplative, and she clenches her jaw, irrationally irritated by the silence and the scenery and the _ridiculous_ amount of Britney Spears she’d put on all her playlists. It’s her own fault, she knows, but it still rankles. Burns. Gnaws at the brittle parts of her—the _inadequate_ parts of her—that she doesn’t like to admit are even there.

Draco takes a noisy sip of his Slurpee.

Pansy fiddles with the emerald stud in her nose.

“Do you still talk to Pucey?” Draco blurts out, and Pansy goes still.

“No,” she answers, wryly. “Which you know. Adrian hasn’t spoken to me since we broke up.”

“That was six months ago.”

“Five.”

“And a half,” Draco corrects her, and then grunts. “He lives somewhere over here.”

“For football?”

“What else would he be doing?”

She snorts. “Well, he _is_ fifteen hundred miles away from _me_. Perk of the job, probably.”

Draco looks at her askance, and it unnerves her a little, how she can’t quite tell what he’s thinking. How she can’t quite get a read on him, or his mood, or why the _fuck_ he’s bringing Adrian fucking Pucey up to her like this.

“What happened between you guys, anyway?” Draco asks, and his tone is difficult to interpret—it could be conversational, casual, even, but there’s a searching kind of alertness to it that makes her believe otherwise. Still—

_“Pansy,” Adrian had said, and it had been so gentle, her name on his lips for the very last time. “You’re not in love with me.”_

_“I could be,” she’d whispered, dread beginning to pool around her tonsils, cold and vaguely acidic, acting like quicksand for her army of excuses. “You don’t know—”_

_“No,” he’d interrupted, before glancing at a picture frame on her mantle; her and Draco’s prom photo. They’d gone as friends, color coordinated her dress and his tux, split three bottles of Dom Perignon on the deck of his family’s beach house before watching the sun rise with sand between their toes and an oasis of forever stretched out in front of them. “You don’t know, do you?”_

She’d pretended not to understand.

She’s still pretending not to understand.

 

* * *

 

_Saturday, August 27 th_

_Somewhere in Nebraska_

 

Draco kisses her on a haystack.

They’re on the outskirts of the fair, surrounded by two mostly-empty six-packs of Corona, and something is different.

The lingering glide of his elbow against hers. The low-pitched rumble of his laughter. The space between them, summer-hot and thick like molasses. The buzzing inside her head is not entirely from the alcohol, but it’s languid. _Blurry._ She’s waiting for him. _He’s_ waiting for him.

“Pansy,” he says, and she drops her empty bottle with a dull clink.

“Draco,” she manages to reply, and he’s tilting her chin up, cupping her jaw, meeting her eyes.

His pupils dilate.

Her thighs clench.

And he kisses her slowly at first, like he’s not quite sure _how_ to, but then she makes a sound—soft and tentative, thin and quavering and _needy_ —and his hands move from her face to her shoulders and she’s being pulled forward, urged into his lap, and her knees are bracketing his legs and his fingers are tracing the curve of her waist and their tongues are curling, twining, the catch of their lips mimicking the roll of her hips, and she shudders, the sensation as liquid as it is instinctive, and the lace of her bra is abrasive where it touches her skin and his palms are _scorching_ where they travel up her sides and he’s _hard_ , she can feel him, feel _it_ , and it isn’t like an awkward adjustment of adolescent morning wood, no, because this is for her, this is _because_ of her, and a whine gets stuck in the back of her throat as she rocks against him, as he yanks her tank top off, as her breasts press against his chest and he fumbles with the button on her shorts, murmuring, no, _panting_ —

“Never thought we’d do this.”

And it’s like a bucket of fucking _ice water_ being poured down her back, it is, because she abruptly feels like the cooling embers at the bottom of a fire pit. Doused. Banked. Suffocated.

She wrenches herself out of his arms, losing her balance on the haystack and toppling backwards.

“What’s wrong?” Draco asks, mouth swollen and red. “Pansy?”

And Pansy can only stare at him, stare and stare and wonder how it’s possible that this whole situation—her shirt on the floor and his sweat on her lips and a borderline electrifying _heat_ coiled like a wire trap in the pit of her stomach—it seems like the culmination of something, like an emotional transaction that’s had years and years of _buildup,_ singular grains of sand sifted through an hourglass to shape the future, this moment; because it seems like _she’s_ finally getting everything she’s ever wanted, and Draco’s just…along for the ride.

Like this is nothing more than a vaguely pleasant surprise to him.

Not a monumental shift in the earth beneath his feet, tectonic plates crashing and ocean currents changing, not a realignment of the planets or the solar system or—

Pansy shakes her head.

She gulps down a rising surge of nausea. Hysteria. Regret.

She runs.

 

* * *

 

_Friday, August 26 th_

_Cortland, Nebraska_

 

They stop for coffee in the early afternoon.

There isn’t a drive-thru, and it isn’t a Starbucks, but Draco dutifully grabs his wallet and saunters inside, the collar of his polo slightly rumpled from the headrest in the car. Five minutes later, he returns with two iced drinks, both milky and light. Pansy can already tell that it’s her usual order; a half-caf vanilla latte. She isn’t sure why she’s so mad about it.

She blinks at the cup he’s holding out.

Snatches it out of his hand.

Takes a sip, short and sweet and semi-automatic.

“You didn’t ask me what I wanted,” she says, voice emerging clipped and slightly accusatory.

“Uh, no?” he replies, swift and easy. Too easy. _Infuriatingly_ easy. “You’ve been getting the same thing for, like, eight years. Why would I have asked?”

She bites down on the tip of her tongue, insisting to herself that she’ll ease up, just a little, once she tastes blood. But the things she aches to say—aches to shout, aches to yell, aches to _scream_ —are still bubbling up the back of her throat, frothy and slimy and vile.

Because she hates it, suddenly.

Hates _him_ , and how he always just _knows_ —knows who she is and knows what she wants and it’s unfair and it’s stupid and it’s just another fucking way for him to permanently wedge himself into her life, for him to _steal_ a spot that she should be saving for someone else, someone who will love her like Draco doesn’t, like Draco _can’t—_

“Maybe my order’s changed,” she grits out.

“What, since last week?”

Her teeth clack together. “ _Yes_ , since last week. Maybe I don’t even _like_ coffee anymore.”

“You liked it this morning,” he points out, sounding annoyed. “And yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before—”

“But that’s not _today_ , is it? _Today_ , you didn’t _ask_. You just _assumed_ that I—” She breaks off, catching sight of how flushed her cheeks are in the side view mirror. “Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

“Pansy—”

“ _Draco_ ,” she sneers, cutting him off.

He starts the car.

She drinks the coffee.

 

* * *

 

_Saturday, August 27 th_

_Somewhere in Nebraska_

 

An hour goes by before he returns to the truck.

She’s still not fully dressed, and his gaze roves over the planes of her body in a way that she only distantly recognizes, settling with long, deliberate pauses on all the places he hadn’t been allowed to touch before tonight. She doesn’t know what it means, that he’s looking at her like that.

Because he’s _studying_ her, brow furrowed and lips parted and hands tucked into the pockets of his chinos and she can _see it_ , the moment he finally fucking _gets it_ , can see how he pieces together her silence and her resentment and her bizarrely unbelievable evasion tactics and her _jealousy_ that night in Colorado, her fingers laced through his and her breath against his neck and—

“I’ve loved you since I was _eleven_ ,” he snaps, the words slipping, tumbling, colliding like he’s been holding onto them far too tightly for far too long. “That’s _half my life_.”

Above him—above _them—_ the moon is a white-bright silver dollar, painting his blond hair blonder and making her think stupid, ridiculous, _poetic_ things. He’s effervescent. The center of her world. She’s been circling him for half _her_ life, and gravity was being such a _bitch_ now that it had caught up with her.

“Yeah,” she replies, stiffly sitting up. The truck bed creaks, suspension as fragile as her grip on reality. “As a friend, right?”

“Pretty sure I don’t want to fuck you as a friend, Pansy,” he says, audibly frustrated and almost, almost, _almost_ amused.

She can’t quite bring herself to flinch. “And _I_ don’t want to just _fuck you_ , Draco.”

He grimaces. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Yeah?”

“ _Yeah_.”

Her smile is tremulous. “Kind of how it sounded.”

“Will you _stop_ doing that?”

“Doing what?”

He makes a vague gesture with his hand. “Acting like this is— _one-sided_. It isn’t.”

“It isn’t,” she repeats, carefully. “Really.”

He rocks back on his heels and kicks at a pebble, pinning her with a glare that’s more intent than it is truly angry. “I’ve loved you since I was _eleven_ ,” he says again, earnestly, _helplessly_ , and it’s—

It is, she thinks in a daze, the closest thing to a declaration she’s likely to get from him.

Draco is dramatic, yes, dramatic and petulant and downright _moody_ when he wants to be—but he keeps his own secrets. He always has. He shares sparingly, doles out honesty with a savage kind of selfishness that, once upon a time, she’d recognized in herself, too.

But he’s _confessing_ something to her right now.

Something big, and something important, and something _risky_.

“Right,” she mumbles on a shaky— _shaken_ —exhale, scooting off the bed of the truck. “Right.”

Dry grass tickles the bottoms of her feet as she stands up; whispers and crunches as she walks towards him. His eyes are steady on hers. Focused. Guarded. Adrenaline is simmering low and slow in her veins, and her skin feels tight around her bones. She comes to a gradual halt directly in front of him. Looks up. He’s taller than her. Has been since his tenth-grade growth spurt.

“Why didn’t you chase me?” she hears herself ask, and she wants to _cringe_ as soon as the question fall off her tongue, wants to take it back and swallow it whole because it isn’t right. It isn’t what she needs an answer to.

“I had to be sure,” he explains, but then he stops, pressing his lips together. “ _You_ had to be sure,” he amends, and Pansy—

Pansy huffs out a laugh, reedy and quiet and _perfect_ , perfect like him and perfect like _them_ and perfect like the hope currently blossoming behind her ribcage, wispy and subtle and so, so _tantalizing_.

She arches up onto her toes.

Frames his face with her hands.

Registers his arms coming to wrap around her waist; to keep her upright, or pull her in closer, or both. Probably both. Definitely both.

“I’ve loved you since I was _eleven_ , Draco,” she says, simply.

She doesn’t mind that the words get lost in his mouth.

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
